Year B, Advent 1
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
North Andover, Massachusetts
The Rev. Stephanie Chase Wilson


Restore us, O God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved [Ps 80:3].  Amen.

Every Advent it’s the same thing.  We are called by the church to wait for Christ, but who can wait?  As I walk around town I struggle to find any evidence of those who have the Advent spirit.  I was sightseeing around Boston on Friday looking for an Advent wreath or materials, but no luck. Lots of Christmas ornaments, Christmas presents, Christmas trees, and the like – but nothing about Advent. We want Christmas to come. Advent is just something that stands between us and the big event. Only once did I find a very public reminder of Advent. “It [was] a sign neatly posted in the front of the [99 Restaurant].  It says ‘Waiters Wanted’”

The people of Isaiah are waiting.  The 64th chapter of Isaiah was written after the Israelites had returned to Israel from their exile. For many generations they had been forced to live as captives in Babylon, dreaming of the time when they would return home. Finally they get home … and things are hard. Their happy homecoming is in reality a struggle. The people become disheartened and so become sinful. What Isaiah means by this is not individual sin so much as communal sin. The community starts to doubt God. They forget what it is God has done for them. So they stop worshipping God and God leaves them for a while, or, at least, it seems that way. But the people are suffering in their sinfulness. They feel separated and alienated from God. Isaiah writes, “for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.” The prophet begs God to reveal God’s self. The Lord was with them through the exile, and now they need God back again. Isaiah wants the Almighty to return, to save the people. But Isaiah is impatient. He lifts up the concept of waiting as a virtue, yet asks God to appear in some pretty dramatic and immediate ways. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.”  Isaiah knows he should wait, but he wants God to come down as soon as possible and make things right.

One thing, however, Isaiah never looses sight of is hope. He doesn’t see much evidence of God among the people right now. But he remembers that the Lord used to be with them. So he waits in hope. He waits in faith that God will return, that the Almighty will remember the people.

In a similar way, the people in the gospel of Mark are waiting. They are waiting for an end to Roman rule of their country. They are waiting for the Messiah. They have been living under occupation for years. They are oppressed and poor. They know a savior is to come to lead them out of this mess. Some people suspect that Jesus is that person, but most do not. When Christ’s followers hear Jesus talk about the end times, they assume that as a prophet, he is simply speaking about God coming at the end of time, not realizing that there is direct tie-in with the speaker. They don’t know his references to the Son of Man are references to himself.

Mark wrote his gospel 30 years after Christ’s death. Jesus has come and gone and the people are still waiting. Many don’t think anything has changed. The Romans still rule their country. They are tired of their oppression and suffering. In fact, the period between 66-70 AD when Mark was writing was a time of great revolt and revolution. The people were taking matters into their own hands.
But the Romans fought back. This culminated with the Romans destroying the Temple and the end of Israel as a unified people for centuries. So Mark is trying to give the people hope in this time of rebellion. He is giving them a vision of what is to come. He reminds them of the story Jesus told about the end times, that his first visit was not the only visit. That God will come again and make things right. In the meantime they are to live in hope.

It is this story of Christ’s second coming that gives us hope.  While we may be preparing for the beginning of the story, knowing where the story ends gives us hope. When we are in the middle of the story, the part where the heroine is tied down to the railroad tracks by the villain, the hero is wrestling to free himself from the grips of an evil socceror, and the village is under attack, we are anxious. We don’t know what will happen. Maybe someone will die. Maybe the villain will release his secret robot and take over the world. We don’t know, and not knowing is scary. But in Advent we are told right up front what the end of the story is going to be. The beginning of the story is in a manger, but the end of the story is that Christ will come with power and great glory, and all things will be made right again. Hope begins with having a vision of the end.

We, right now, are in the middle of the story. We live in that uncomfortable time between the first coming and the second, where we must be faithful to God even though, as in Isaiah, we don’t see God as immediately and concretely as in the days of old. In the middle of the story is all the scary stuff that is working up to the final culmination and it’s not always clear who is going to come out on top. We in the middle have trials. We have illnesses. People we know and love suffer. We are concerned about alcoholism, drug addictions, and the economy. We worry about wars, and illnesses, and natural disasters. We worry about relationships. Are we loved? Are we known? Do we matter? So we wait in hope for that end time when all manner of things will be made right.

The great preacher Fred Craddock once said, “Maybe people are obsessed with the Second Coming because deep down they are disappointed in the first one.”  Weren’t things supposed to be put right then? But even after Christ’s death and resurrection people kept on sinning. Evil kept on happening. So why did Jesus come the first time? Maybe the purpose of the first coming wasn’t to make things right, but to make us right. Maybe it has something to do with what Jesus said over and over the in the gospel today.
He said, “keep watch!” “stay awake!” “keep alert!” There is some urgency in those words.  In Mark, Jesus doesn’t just describe the end times, he gives us a task to keep awake. We need to be engaged in the work of a Christian, living a Christian life. In fact, some have argued that Christ’s admonition during this little apocalypse is really a call to discipleship. To be alert to God is to know that every step in your life is relevant. Every step could be your last and used in the final judgment. How you conduct yourself at each moment has meaning to the Lord. Be alert! We don’t know the time.

If Jesus had given us the exact date and hour, all Christians would have fallen away from the path centuries ago. Why bother? If the eschaton is not going to happen in your lifetime, why put in the energy? I think that the time isn’t shared with us because the Almighty don’t want us to get slack. Again, to be alert and not know the hour means that every moment counts. Jesus WANTS every moment to count. That is why we were told in this manner.

There is a story that when Martin Luther was asked what he would do if he knew that the world was going to end tomorrow, he replied, “I would plant an apple tree this afternoon.”  Luther didn’t speculate about the end of the world.  He focused on the present.  He would plant that apple tree today because he believed that what may happen in the future does not excuse us from what God requires of us now, today, in our ordinary living. Luther believed keeping awake had to do with living fully in this life, not simply focusing on the next.

Some people spend so much time looking to the heavens for the coming of the Lord that they stumble over the homeless person at their feet.  We often don’t recognize Jesus when we see him.  At the first coming many people didn’t recognize the child in the manger as the King of Kings. Over and over again Jesus sides with the poor and downtrodden. As Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew, when we care for the least of these, we care for him. Many people don’t recognize in the needy the Lord of Lords. Part of what it means to be alert is to give and help those who suffer.

We are not to speculate over when the Lord comes; we are to do the work Christ has given us to do.  We are to share the gospel, we are to help those in need, we are to strive for distributive justice, we are to live in faith, nurturing our spiritual lives and relationship with God. It’s not for us to know the day or hour.  It’s our responsibility to engage in active waiting, doing the work we are given to do, preparing our hearts for the coming of God. Being awake is about being good disciples. The first coming is about putting us in right relationship with God, becoming disciples, helping those who suffer, living in hope. The second coming is about restoring everything else.

That is what we do at Advent. We actively wait. We plant our apple trees and live our lives in faith.  We look forward to what the coming of the Lord will bring. It may be a day of thunder and earthquakes, but they are only to shake up the status quo. The judgment will come to establish justice.  It may be a terrible day, but it will be a beautiful terror.  If we have followed Christ’s words and kept awake, in faith doing the work we have been given to do, loving God and neighbor, we will rejoice in that day.  Amen.